A313 I Sea Creature I Bluey/Green

This colour, or one very like it has been my favourite colour since forever. I was given a wooden case full of hard dry square edged powdery pastels by my first real boyfriend. From the start it was the bluey/green colour that I loved the most and used the less. While I no longer have the boyfriend — he went on to be a chemical engineer with an interest in cloning and brown coal — I still have the wooden case, and it still has some pastels in it. Though not the bluey/green one.

To say I adored this colour is no exaggeration. Of all the colours of the rainbow why was this colour the one that got me?

In the first instance

The colour I see isn’t the colour of the thing itself. A colour is the wavelength of what is left after the energy of the other colours has been absorbed by the chemical’s energetic reactions. So what is seen is the escaping not the containing. But it’s never always one or the other. It’s a mistake to think this is statis: it might be stable but it’s not stuck. The stability comes from the form of the media, from sub-molecular to square edged stick. Which eventually becomes — through energetic wielding — coloured dust.

What colour is it, exactly?

Not that that really matters, and usually the exact classification of anything appals me. Nonetheless it is fun to quickly trawl the interspace to see what — as an autodidact — I can find out about my bluey/green. As far as I can tell, and according to Michael Douma’s interactive Pigments Through the Ages my colour could have its origin in any one of a number of blues …

… and unless I wanted to make the colour it matters nought to me which of these blues it most closely resembles. The heridatory of green is similarly vast — both as a colour it its own right, and as a mix of blue and yellow

In any case, there is no way to faithfully reproduce a colour between media formats, or for a colour to remain exactly the same colour with the changing of light throughout the passage of a day. Besides, I have one friend who calls what I see as a shade of blue, purple. I am not fond of the colour purple [though I enjoyed the book] and I don’t even like the sound of the word.

To my eye, what does matter about all those blues is their shared character: they are bright and dark.

How fantastic that one colour can be both these things.

Bright and dark

Seemingly antinomic, they aren’t really. It’s true that the online Macquarie Dictionary with its preference for simple literality and subsumed references to the chemical properties of colour supports the antonymy with the definitions of ‘filled with light’ and ‘having little or no light’. However, according to the online Macmillan Dictionary — somewhat obtusely it must be admitted — bright colours are strong but not dark, and dark colours are strong but not pale. So its my claim that a strong colour can be both bright and dark. [What is not dark and not pale? Light and bright?]

My colour is strong.

Being strong

This matters. It is not strength for its own sake though. Strength for its own sake is fear, cross-fit, vanity, useless. This kind of strong ruptures under pressure or cracks at a clever touch. Real strength is something else altogether. It’s movement and energy, absorbing and letting go. Any novice meditator, sportsperson, Buddhist and/or scientist recognises these properties as being fundamental to life.

The golden gong

For me, the best thing about my bluey/green is its inherent paradoxes. The experience of fielding those tensions is gritty and fun. Even just saying and writing ‘bright and dark’ sends the golden gong ringing.